A social media strategy is more than just a Facebook page or Twitter feed. When run properly, social media is a powerful engine of engaging with the customer and generating traffic to your website / blog - your business. Simply put, every action you take on social networking should be part of a larger marketing strategy. This means that every post, response, and comment should be guided by a plan that is driving the achievement of business goals.
It may seem complicated, but if you take the time to create a comprehensive social media strategy, the rest of your social efforts should follow naturally. The social media landscape has evolved in recent years, so if you are joining now, you may be late. This is the hard reality. But it is still possible to succeed in social media.
As with any marketing strategy, the approach is straightforward:
- Identify the social channels where your target audience is.
- Solidify your brand with your posts - what information will resonate with your audience in social media?
- Understand with social channels the best complement to the conversion optimization process of your site. Ultimately, your goal is to create a steady stream of buyers.
1 - Begin by formulating a strategy
Before you begin, you should focus on creating a solid strategy for your campaigns. That means understanding what you want to achieve with your campaigns - do you want to build an online community, drive more leads to your site, or promote your blog? And then determine how you can achieve this. You should choose your goal for the campaign, for example, decide that you want to direct leads to your site. Then choose which metrics you will monitor. In this case, a good metric could be the number of users who are contacting the company or clicks on strategic links. After that, create your message and content around the goal.
2 - Analyze your competitors
Searching for your competition is a crucial step. However, many marketers end up (mistakenly) neglecting when it comes to social media marketing. Competitor analysis can give you valuable information about what is working for your competition - which can be used in your campaigns. You can, for example, see how they approach certain types of topics and what content models they create. Do they share tutorials or bet on questions and answers? Which posts get the most results?
You can also see how many times a day they post, what are the best posting times and even the tone used. Discovering your competitor's social media strategies allows you to create an even stronger plan, gaining an edge. You can do this manually or, to be more effective, use different competitor analysis tools to compile the data for you.
3 - Promote a message using different content formats
You've researched your competitors and discovered the best content formats for your audience. Now experiment with these formats to promote your content, your message or your product. The variety of formats will make your channels more interesting and increase engagement.
4 - Find the balance between promotional and non-promotional content
This step gained even more importance with the new Facebook algorithm. If you only share promotional content on social media, people will be disappointed and will stop following you. If, however, you only have non-promotional content, you also will not receive the desired result. Always add external content to your feed. One great way to do this is to find some respectable sources in your industry and refill their contents - they may be interesting to your audience. Your consumer will love it, and this can also help build strong relationships with other experts in your area.
5 - Publish original content, following the latest trends
Find current topics and give your angle to the subject. If all content experts are writing about how Facebook Zero will hurt reach, for example, you should be the one who writes about helping companies connect better with their customers.
6 - Use tools that allow you to schedule posts to optimize your time
Creating quality posts takes time and requires programming. The best way to optimize your posting routine is to use the post programming tools to make the process easier. You can set up a social calendar in advance by creating and scheduling posts to be published on specific dates and times across platforms. This significantly reduces the time spent uploading content and publishing on every social network in your company, giving you more time to create embedded and engaging content for your users.
7 - Use the Social Listening tools to communicate more with your audience
Social listening tools are extremely powerful. They let you find out what your audience is talking about your brand, very useful for correcting your strategy. Use social listening tools to monitor the impact of your campaigns. Realize people's questions about your product, brand and area - this is a great way to prepare new content ideas for your consumer.
8 - Create a unique hashtag for each campaign
Hashtags are a powerful help to promote your campaigns on Instagram and Twitter. They can bring more traffic, increase engagement, and track the results of each project. By creating a brand hashtag and specific campaigns, you can easily track engagement and user-generated content, even when users do not mention your brand. Brand hashtags should not replace the common hashtags that your audience is using. Use both in each publication to maximize reach and traceability.
9 - Bet on lives
Livestreaming is a big trend in social media, and if you're not in, you're missing out on a great opportunity. Bet on lives on Facebook or Instagram by preparing content related to your social campaigns. To increase engagement, prepare Q & A sessions and answer customer questions in real time. Once the broadcast is over, you can save it and share it as video on your platforms, delivering video content that also performs well.
10 - Analyze your performance
If your campaigns are over, that does not mean the job is over. Constantly review the success of your campaign as it progresses and rate it closely once it's over. You can get valuable information about what worked well and what was not so successful in order to adjust your future campaigns. This also gives you the chance to identify the top content of each campaign and reschedule (or reuse) to optimize results and take advantage of its popularity.
Conclusions
Calming the mood of the release, continue to monitor your social networks to see how your new strategy performs and how the audience is reacting to it. Only then will you have enough indicators to work your brand in a differentiated way in the market, increasing your competitive advantage. By creating a climate of expectation, it is easier to prepare your followers for a successful launch. By creating rich content added to a constant monitoring, your social networks will become the main channel of communication with the public!
